The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Three Articles

    I found these three posts interesting, and rather than fill up the news section, I decided to put them here:

    The Birth, Decline, and Re-Emergence of the Solid South: A Short History

    Since the Civil War, the American South has mostly been a one-party region.  However, by the turn of the 21st century, its political affiliation had actually swung from the Democrats to the Republicans.  Here’s how it happened.

    It is not an oversimplification to say that slavery was the single most important issue leading to the Civil War.  For not only was slavery the most important on its own merits, but none of the other relevant issues, such as expansion into the western territories or states’ rights, would have mattered much at all if not for their indelible connection to slavery.

    Initially, Northerners rallied around the issue of Free Soil: opposition to slavery on economic grounds.  Small farmers and new industrial workers did not want to compete with large slave plantations and unpaid slave labor.  This was the philosophy that bound together the new  Republican Party.

    What Money Can’t Buy

    Guernica: The book cites some resistance from economists about getting involved with moral questions. Has this always been the case? Is this endemic to the discipline?

    Michael Sandel: Well, most economics that is taught in college and universities today projects itself as a value-neutral science. This claim has always been open to question, but I think it’s especially in doubt today.

    Over the last three decades economics has enlarged its ambition and subject matter. If you look at the economic textbook of Paul Samuelson, which was the most influential economic textbook in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, he defined economics by its subject matter—inflation, unemployment, foreign trade, the money supply, what made economies grow. Questions like that. Today if you look at most economic textbooks, economics is not defined by subject matter. It’s presented as a science of social choice that applies not only to material goods—not only to flat-screen televisions—but to every decision we make, whether it’s to get married, or to stay married, whether to have children and how to educate those children, or how to look after our health. Economics has increasingly become the science of human behavior in general, and it’s all the more unlikely to think that it can possibly be value-free—and, in fact, it isn’t. Economics rests on un-argued assumptions that need to be examined.

    Do Some Americans Really Want More Poverty?

    [Edward] Conard is a former partner of Romney’s at Bain Capital, the private equity firm that made them both staggeringly rich.  Conard has spent the last four years writing a book, which will be released shortly.  One of the premises is so foul as to make you marvel at humanity’s capacity to perform the mental gymnastics necessary to justify just about anything.

    People believe what they want to believe, and apparently Conard believes that rising income inequality among Americans is a good thing for the United States.

    ... Conard claims the real cause of our current economic calamity wasn’t irresponsible and unethical dealings by financial institutions that engaged in chicanery alike levering their debt by factors of twenty and misleading people about the credibility of junk investments.  No, don’t you know, it’s simply because regular people got panicky and tried to pull their money out of the banks.  Silly plebeians.  If they’d just left it there so the super rich and financial institutions could have kept investing it, we’d all be fine.

    Comments

    From the 'Birth, Decline...Solid South' link:

    After the Civil War, Radical Republicans orchestrated the Reconstruction of the South: a military occupation of the former Confederacy, the end slavery via the 13th Amendment, safeguarding political and some civil rights for new black citizens...

    Unknown to most Americans, the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution ("All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States..") which gave rights to 'all persons' was passed only because the Solid South was under military occupation in 5 military districts.

    As part of the Reconstruction Acts, each state of the Solid South had to ratify the 14th Amendment to end the military occupation and regain the Constitutional rights of statehood. President Johnson, who took over after the Lincoln assassination and was a southern sympathizer, vetoed the Reconstruction Acts, but his veto was overridden by a Congress that had no representatives from the Solid South.

    The crux being, if the South was not under military occupation after the Civil War, and if they were simply readmitted to the Union with no conditions, obstruction would be the name of the game.  There would never have been a 14th Amendment guaranteeing the rights of all Americans. The fact that blacks were still deprived of their rights in the south, was due to actions the Supreme Court over the following decades. This period is described in Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903, a recently published book. It covers the decisions, and mentions the failure of the Founding Fathers to realize the potential for the Supreme Court to become unaccountable oppressors of the freedoms that Alexander Hamilton, and others, thought they would be the last line, and zealous defenders of for the nation.

    The book is interesting, because again today we see actions of Congress that may be struck down by a one vote majority of the Supreme Court. One of the solutions during the post-Civil War period, which was not passed, was to require a 2/3 majority of the Supremes to overturn a law passed by Congress.


    Thanks for noting the book. I'm headed to Amazon. Hopefully, it's available in ebook format.

    I view the Supremes as being identical to the religious leaders who let political views color the legal decisions rendered. 


    Johnson of course was from Tennessee, so almost de facto a sympathizer.

    "Inherently Unequal" notes that if Johnson had compromised a little bit, he could have prevented much of Radical Reconstruction, but he was a loony and absolutist.

    But "Unequal" also notes the role Johnson played in supporting the revocation of black rights under his view of white superiority - blaming this solely on the Supreme Court seems unwarranted, though with Grant's rise to power and a Republican super-majority, it was the Court that cut the knees out of reconstruction at the same time as it was losing interest among northern Republicans (bigger issues had come to dominate).

    Ironically, it was also the revocation of the 3/5th rule that increased southern representation and made it harder to pass Republican legislation, but then the Republicans refused to seat southern representatives in 1866, tilting the field again back in their favor.

    It should be remembered in discussing all this that Grant's government was extremely corrupt - anything good that came out of it was largely by accident.


    Yeah. The original reconstruction act, of March 2, 1867, titled 'An act to provide for a more efficient government for the Rebel States' was about one page long, it was passed, vetoed and overrode the same day. Imagine that sort of brevity and action today. see Library of Congress - link.


    Speaking of books, last night I saw the second half of Bill Moyer's interview with Luis Urrea, who has just written Queen of America: